Consistent Hashing in Akka .NET

Routers

In Akka .NET, a router is like a load balancer. It is a special actor that does not handle messages itself, but passes them on to other actors who can handle them. For this reason routers are the only kind of actor that can deal with several messages concurrently (whereas normal actors process messages sequentially, one by one).

The way routers forward messages to handling actors depends on the type of router you use. Some common routing strategies include broadcast, round robin, and random. In this article, we will deal with the ConsistentHashing router. Consistent hashing means that messages with the same (arbitrarily defined) key are always handled by the same actor.

Another important distinction between routers is that they fall under two categories: Group routers and Pool routers. “Pool” means the same as in the context of “Thread Pool” or “Connection Pool”: it is a dynamic set of resources that can adaptively grow and shrink as needed. A Pool router creates the actors that it will forward messages to for handling, and as such, it also supervises them. Group routers, on the other hand, passed a set of actors that are created beforehand. As such the handling actors are fixed in number and detached from the router; the Group router does not supervise them and often does not know when they die. For this reason Pool routers are preferred for most use cases.

There is a lot more to be said about routers. However, this section is intended only as a brief background. For more comprehensive references, check the links in the Further Reading section.

Consistent Hashing Example with Currency Pairs

In the financial industry, currency exchange is defined in terms of a currency pair, such as EUR/USD. This currency pair has a price, such as 1.1087. This means that 1 Euro is worth 1.1087 US Dollars. The currency exchange market is very volatile, and these prices can change several times per second.

In our example, we will be generating fictitious currency prices. We would like to have a pool of actors to handle these price updates. We would also like each currency pair to be always be handled by the same actor.

As always, we first need to install the Akka NuGet package:

Install-Package Akka

Then, in our Main() method, we will first add some trivial setup code:

Here we’re setting up a Pool router using the Consistent Hashing strategy. A pool of 3 actors will be created, supervised by the router. We can send a message to the router as we would with any other actor, but it will actually be handled by one of its child actors.

The child actors are of type CurrencyPriceChangeHandlerActor. This type of actor simply writes the received message to the console, along with its own path so that we can distinguish between the child actors. The path is dynamically generated by the Pool router and we have no control over it.

The message handled by this type of actor is a simple combination of currency pair and price. In line with best practices, the message is immutable by design. More importantly, it implements IConsistentHashable. This allows us to provide a key that will be used for the consistent hashing algorithm. In our case, the key is the currency pair.

Note: this is just one of three ways how we can specify the key to use with consistent hashing. Refer to the documentation for more information.

All we have left is the implementation of SendRandomMessage(). It picks a random currency pair and a random price, and sends a message. It also introduces a random delay between each message. Without this delay, you’ll see a lot of the same currency pairs in sequence.

You can see how although all three handling actors are in use, there is a direct correspondence between the currency pair and the actor that handles it. For example, USD/CAD is always handled by actor $c, whereas NZD/EUR is always handled by actor $b. This is what is implied by consistent hashing.

As far as I can tell, control of which actors handle which keys is up to the router. I would have liked to, for instance, create an actor to specifically handle each currency pair. But I don’t think that is possible, even with Group routers (correct me if I’m wrong). Just let the router worry about how to allocate the keys to the actors.

7 thoughts on “Consistent Hashing in Akka .NET”

hi, it was a good post like the others, it helped me to understand better how consistent has pool group works, thanks.
in order to create an actor per concurrency pair I applied this solution: I have and actor coordinator responsible of create one actor per key and then save its reference in a dictionary (key: concurrency pair, value: Iactorref). when the coordinator receives a message identify which is the child actor that has to process it.
well, how you can see I didn’t use any kind of routing, I created one on my own, in this way a can send a group of messages to the same actor.
Greetings

The approach you took is perfectly valid, in fact it’s called the Entity Per Child pattern. Also you don’t need to keep a dictionary; you can simply check whether the child with the name you need exists (refer to the Akka .NET Web Crawler sample, specifically the end of this file.

Entity Per Child is good when you need exactly one actor per domain object, and is very practical when actors are stateful. If you’re okay with each actor handling more than one domain object, you can use a consistent hashing pool router. The pool can grow and shrink dynamically according to varying load. Such a router is best when actors are stateless, although they will also work for stateful actors (but it’s a little more complex than with EPC, because you have to keep a mapping between the key and the state).

The idea is that you start with a reasonable number (mostly an educated guess) and let the pool of workers handle the load. Some routers can grow and shrink according to how busy they are. I don’t remember whether a consistent hashing router can do that. In the case of a consistent hashing router, you would often want to allocate workers according to the shape and size of your data.

Great post, thanks! I have a question though, let’s take akka.net WebCrawler as an example. They use the following approach
1) Broadcast search message
2) Receive positive/negative acknowledgement or timeout (basically jobfound/jobnotfound or timeout).
As far as I can see, the approach above can be replaced with just consistent hashing router. Am I missing something?
Your thoughts are highly appreciated.

It’s been a while, but consistent hashing works best when you need to make sure that messages with a particular category of IDs (such as a set of currency pairs, in the above case) always reach the same actor. This is often the case when they have some kind of state.

In the case of the web crawler, you don’t really care which actor gets to do the job. There is no state; they do what they have to do and report back. So a plain broadcast is fine.